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By Microsoft's standards, Starfield is a giant leap backwards for accessibility
(www.eurogamer.net)
From the off, I discovered that Starfield has unintuitive UI, with menus that are cluttered yet lacking in useful information and detail. For example, when you pick up loot or a new weapon, item details don’t appear automatically, so to make an informed choice as to whether to keep what you've just found, you have to head into your inventory menu to check the details there. Traversing menus is a huge part of Starfield, from managing inventory and ammo types, through fast travelling, to reading your quest log. However it’s often frustrating to navigate and understand.
That may be a legit UI criticism, but I don't see how it's an accessibility issue.
For example, if you remap the buttons for shooting, aiming, throwing grenades or scanning to face buttons, players cannot then rely on having simultaneous control of the reticle to accurately direct the trajectory of those actions. For many gamers moving their right thumb back and forth between aiming with the right stick and then pressing a face button is fatiguing, especially in an FPS. Actions such as sprinting and melee are accessed by stick clicks, which are impossible buttons for many disabled gamers to press. There are so many actions to map though, therefore you’re always going to have actions that aren’t easily accessible and need to be mapped to stick clicks anyway.
I mean, okay, but I don't see how this is a step backwards. Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 do the same thing.
As for "especially in an FPS", I'm not sure that there are many (any?) games in the genre that act differently. checks Halo seems to do the same "left stick push to sprint, right stick push to melee".
I don't know whether Starfield supports controllers with additional buttons beyond the standard XBox controller buttons. That might be an option for some. But I don't think that what it's doing is particularly unusual.
The biggest issue with the controls is the constant use of the D-pad. During fast-paced gunfights, it’s quite challenging to quickly swap weapons without dying, and this stops many players from switching between the vast plethora of laser, ballistic and energy weapons available to use. You’re able to swap weapons through the pause menu, but this isn’t the ideal solution as it breaks immersion.
I mean, okay, but having the pause menu seems like it's better than what most shooters provide. I mean, I don't play a lot of console shooters, but I don't believe that many have a different way of switching weapons.
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Yeah, Halo uses the D-pad too. Maybe you can remap it, but then, you could remap it on Starfield too.
I mean, I can believe that there are accessibility issues, but I don't understand how the ones he raised are them.
The only point that I really agree on is that VATS, present in the 3D Fallout games, probably was a solid way of helping people who had trouble aiming aim, and Starfield not having it could legitimately prevent some people from being able to play it who could play the Fallout series.
I'm also kind of surprised that given that they did a whole article on accessibility, they didn't mention colorblind accessibility. That's a very common form of disability, and it's something that game designers can legitimately normally work around. It doesn't look like Starfield has colorblind accessibility options (though it's possible that some of the UI was intrinsically designed to be more-friendly to the colorblind).